Venezuela's interim president, Delcy Rodriguez, declared seven days of national mourning for people killed in the earthquakes that struck the country the previous week, as the official death toll rose to 2,295.
Rodriguez announced the mourning period in a message on Telegram, saying it would begin at 6 p.m. on Wednesday. Her statement presented the observance as a response to the scale of the human losses caused by the disaster.
The updated casualty figure came from National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez. Alongside the 2,295 reported deaths, he said more than 11,000 people had been injured. The AFP report carried by The Standard also said thousands of people remained missing, leaving the full impact of the earthquakes unresolved at the time of the announcement.
The figures describe several distinct parts of the emergency. The death toll represents fatalities reported by officials by the event date, while the injury count covers a much larger group of people harmed by the earthquakes. The separate report of thousands missing indicates that many families still lacked confirmed information about relatives or other people caught in the disaster.
Delcy Rodriguez's declaration set a seven-day national period of remembrance against that backdrop. In her Telegram message, she described Venezuela as deeply wounded by the loss of life. The announcement did not change the official casualty accounting, but it marked a formal acknowledgment by the interim government of the deaths and the country's grief.
The numbers available on July 1 remained a snapshot of an unfolding disaster. Officials had identified 2,295 deaths and more than 11,000 injuries, while the missing-person total was given only as being in the thousands. The report did not provide a more precise missing count, so the three figures should not be treated as directly comparable or combined into a single total.
The report also did not identify a final overall toll. With people still listed as missing, the confirmed number of deaths stood apart from cases whose outcomes had not yet been established. That distinction was central to understanding the situation as Venezuela entered the mourning period.
The official announcement paired the timetable for mourning with updated casualty information. It established when the observance would start while keeping the missing-person figure separate from the confirmed toll and acknowledging the much larger number of people reported injured.
For the seven days announced by Rodriguez, the government designated the earthquake victims as the focus of national mourning. As of the event date, 2,295 deaths were the official figure cited by the head of the National Assembly, and the scale of injury and unresolved missing-person cases showed that the consequences extended well beyond the confirmed fatalities.
